Heroes are not always as obvious as the dedicated cop on the beat or the firefighter saving lives, and too often we forget that all men and women who willingly enter the military automatically join the ranks of heroics simply by protecting the country and risking their very lives. I've had the rare pleasure of meeting an occasional hero, one of whom I mentioned briefly in my most recent Air Force blog entry (see link list).
For me, probably because I'm getting older and more impatient with my own species, my other heroes are increasingly those who speak out logically about controversial issues with which they are somehow associated. About things that we, the people, deserve to know. What follows in today's blog entry might involve heroism, but I'll let you be the judge.
My previous entry about Dr. Edward Condon and the Colorado UFO study brought a highly intriguing response from former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas, a name very familiar in the credible archives of UFO research. My readers probably understand by now that I don't spend a lot of time on details offered in great depth elsewhere, so before I continue I'll strongly suggest that you visit nicap.org, one of my favorite UFO reference sites, click on the search engine and type in "Robert Salas." Several articles will become instantly available so that Mr. Salas' fascinating account as a military officer involved with a UFO event can be fully appreciated.
In brief here, however, Capt. Salas was an officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, in 1967 when UFOs began overflying the base in the evening -- and ultimately one hovered over a battery of Minutemen missiles, where it apparently knocked out both primary and back-up power, rendering the missiles useless. While Salas didn't actually see the UFOs, he was in communication with several security and operational personnel who did, and they kept him fully apprised of the UFO maneuvers. One member of the team sustained a still unspecified injury and left by ambulance. The affected missiles (up to 20, depending upon areas where additional UFO activity was witnessed) could not be made operational again until at least the next day, and evidently authorities had no idea how they were knocked out of commission. You may recall, per the book Clear Intent (mentioned in a previous blog entry), that Malmstrom and other U.S. and foreign bases experienced another encounter with UFOs likely causing peculiar instrumentation problems in 1975. As we should expect by now, the government characteristically snaked its way around that situation until its public position dictated that there was no UFO involvement.
Mr. Salas has testified publicly about his base's UFO incident and also wrote a book detailing the incident with co-author James Klotz (forward by Raymond E. Fowler) entitled Faded Giant, a term generally referencing a nuclear situation. The authors spent considerable time looking up original witnesses and documentation relating to the 1967 incident, and the resulting book may be ordered through amazon.com and other outlets.
This extremely important witness to the tense 1967 military incident, a ranking officer with crucial military responsibilities at that time, now offers for us additional information about the absurdities of the Colorado UFO study. With his permission, I am quoting below the full text of his response this week:
"Thanks for your info about your letter from Ed Condon regarding the 1964 Socorro incident. Here's more evidence that Condon whitewashed the UFO issue for the Air Force.
"I have written a book, "Faded Giant" which talks about the /Echo/ and/Oscar/ flight missile shutdowns (Malmstrom AFB, MT) during UFO encounters in March 1967. Sometime, soon after the date of the Echo
shutdowns (March 16, 1967) one of Condon's committee members, Dr. Roy Craig received information that the Echo shutdown may have involved UFO activity and he flew to Malmstrom to 'investigate.' Upon his arrival, he
was told by Lt. Col. Lewis Chase (an experiencer -- ref. RB 47 case) that there was nothing to the 'rumor' of UFOs but that he could speak with Mr. Low, another Condon co-conspirator, about it after their
investigation was completed.
"Apparently Craig bought into that and did not investigate further. Neither the Echo or Oscar (one week later)
shutdowns were ever reported to Blue Book or investigated by Condon, even though the Air Force Unit History Report dated Jan - Mar 1967 stated specifically, 'Rumors of UFOs was disproven!!!' Obviously the
Air Force and Condon did not want to have to investigate the possibility that this very significant event (the disabling of 20 nuclear missiles during UFO sightings) may have occurred."
One wonders, as more anecdotal information of this nature comes to light about the Colorado study, what still-unknown forces simmered behind the scenes in Dr. Condon's UFO kitchen. The late (and often hilariously in error) UFO debunker Phil Klass tried to make project members Edward Condon and Robert Low "victims" of UFO proponents such as Dr. James McDonald, but it's quite obvious that the downfall of key project participants centered heavily upon scientists performing negligible science -- or no science at all.
I've not re-posted visuals on this blog previously, but I am putting up my 1968 letter from Gerald Ford (see blog of June 11, 2007) again to drive home some nebulous point that deserves more clarity than I can manage here. Maybe I'm just tired of the official nonsense -- thousands of impressive UFO reports just from the U.S., plus former military personnel putting their reputations on the line by daring to go public, and so many in Congress just sitting like bumps on logs, refusing to do a damned thing to make their public testimony easier and not fraught with potential legal threats for coming forward. Sometimes, I feel that if I read one more official statement assuring us that UFOs represent no threat to our national security -- yet military personnel are forbidden under various regulations to go public with their dramatic UFO encounters because speaking out may violate national security -- I may well turn to stone.
Gerald Ford? Congressman, then President, Gerald Ford, the subject of so many entries on this blog, now departed, of course. Mr. Ford, I would suggest rhetorically, knew, knew the Colorado project turned into a farce. Why didn't he do something, anything? The "UFO baby" lingered restlessly in Ford's hands since the Michigan UFO sightings, when he spoke oh SO eloquently about the need for an investigation, the once-and-forever, tell-all-at-last, absolute final word and determination. What happened? What happens to those folks in Washington whenever important UFO evidence flies into their soup?
Robert Salas -- thank you for enlightening us, sir. The rest of us should always ask the question, who are the real patriots? What extraordinary measures sometimes constitute heroism? Who will offer and interpret the information we have been denied on a regular basis, and for so long, by the nameless and faceless who, though performing their duties expertly and covertly, nonetheless perform them in that sector of a free and open government intended to impart knowledge to all citizens? One needn't be a conspiracy theorist, or even a "bad" American, for gosh sakes, just to insist that our government tell the people the truth.
